Engaging Conference Attendees From Start To Finish (and even after): A Graphic Recording Guide To Success

August 16, 2016

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Conferences can be physically and mentally daunting. It takes careful planning and creativity to make your content or your booth visible amid a sea of banners, merchandise tables, food stands, and cosplayers. Sometimes you need something more than a branded cell phone charger.

So how do you stand out in a crowd and get your great ideas, conference objective, and message across?

Clients trust us to use real time graphic recording to spark engagement, interest, and excitement at large-scale events. Read below to learn more about interactive conference ideas and how we’ve engaged attendees from Austin, to San Francisco, to London, and beyond.

SXSWi attendees couldn’t wait to snap a pic of the biggest insights of the day, captured in graphic recording form.

1) Get The Hype Train Rolling, With Illustrated Tweets

You know your event starts long before you hit the stage or the trade show floor. We are experts at using infographics and graphic recording to lay the groundwork for compelling interactive sessions and interesting conference ideas. Engaging attendees before your event starts builds anticipation and kicks off a dialogue that you can continue with attendees on social media. But how do you start the conversation before the conference even opens?

Social media is an obvious place to start. Studies show that we’re more likely to remember and share content with visuals.Years of visualizing marketing and technology thought leaders has positioned us to create unique ways our clients can get the conversation rolling on social media. Our tweet-sized infographics with session titles, speaker names, and booth locations are all great ways to get attendees engaged before they even pick up their trade show or conference badge.

Take SAP for example. SAP turned to ImageThink for interactive conference ideas to help them promote their programming, and build anticipation and buzz and for its last two SAPPHIRE NOW conferences. The images kicked off a conversation on social media that carried throughout and even after the event.

SAP tweeted ImageThink’s illustrated “twitter-bites” to promote sessions before their SAPPHIRE NOW conference two years in a row.

Time lapse promos are another great way to get on conference attendees’ must-see list. For attendees who have never seen a graphic recorder at work before, time lapse promos offer a fresh new hook and stand-out from ordinary email announcements.

Graphic recording towers added an interactive element to SXSW 2015.

2) It’s Go Time: Visualize The Big Day

Now that you’ve primed your conference audience, finding ways to captivate and wow them is the next big challenge. Whether you are sponsoring the entire conference or just one booth at a trade show, it is still crucial to create an engaging and interactive environment. Attracting attendees to your space and making a real connection with them makes all the difference between a successful and a lackluster conference campaign.

ImageThink created this mural-sized infographic live at Amex’s booth at the 2016 GBTA conference in Denver, CO.

The American Express Global Business Traveler team had the same challenge as they reviewed trade show booth designs for 2016 GBTA conference in Denver, CO. Recognizing the magnetic pull of live illustration, AMEX turned to ImageThink for an interactive conference idea to create an evolving mural sized infographic that reflected the needs of business travelers. Attendees would stop and watch the live mural unfold. It was incredible to see the number of people who engaged. Even better to hear the great conversations it sparked between AMEX and their prospective clients.

Social listening boards go a step further, inviting attendees to answer a question or share a thought, and watch the graphic recorder illustrate it in real time. They are a great way to start a dialogue and gather useful customer data all at once.

In recent years at Tech Crunch, UPS invited attendees to make business pitches for ImageThink to illustrate, and shipped them the boards after the conference ended. Not only did UPS gain valuable face to face time with influencers of some incredible companies, but they also left them with a unique and useful gift that serves as a reminder of UPS’s commitment to great service.

UPS gifted this astronaut was an illustrated business pitch at a Tech Crunch conference.

4) Get Visual to Keep The Conversation Going

You could have the most robust, interactive, engaging session of the conference. The activities at your booth could be the talk of the town. But if attendees don’t take something away at the end of it all, then all of your hard work stays on the convention floor. How do you take the relationship beyond the conference closing party?

Having ImageThink at your event doesn’t simply enhance the experience of being there–it creates content that can be shared afterwards. This means you have tons of creative follow up ideas and dozens of touch points for developing and deepening relationships. At SXSWi, Ogilvy’s 60,000 limited edition prints of our work ran out as lines snaked the conference floors to collect them. We’ve seen our clients include our work in everything from company newsletters, to social media posts, to prints on keepsakes like mugs, thank you cards, and posters.